The Day Before Yesterday: Adrian Smith, modern historian

Nothing has happened on the book other than my drafting a forward, which is a bit like buying the 45s before buying the record player (dated reference but apposite in an era when vinyl is in the ascendant – like the Ryan Gosling character in the wonderful La La Land, I am as I type listening to a jazz LP, Wynford Marsalis’s debut album to be precise – how on earth did he get Miles’s sidemen, including Herbie Hancock, to play on it?!). In my blog entries over the past two years I have made only oblique reference to the reason why this project has moved forwards in fits and starts. There is no cause to do so any longer – from January 2015 our son, Adam, was terminally ill; and sadly he died just before Christmas. Not surprisingly, writing about Richard Fairey has not been a priority. The Guardian online contains an obituary of Adam, which hopefully will appear in the actual newspaper [http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/jan/13/adam-smith-obituary]. Almost a month has passed since Adam’s death, and the grieving continues, but sooner rather than later I’ll embark on the penultimate chapter, while at the same time concluding my review of the previous chapters with Jane Tennant. Once forward/acknowledgements and concluding chapter are written then the complete draft will be read by a relative of Jane’s whose knowledge of aviation means he can OK or correct technical detail in the book. While the aerospace expert is reading the book, I’ll review family film material now on DVD to see if it contains any information I might want to feed into what is a penultimate iteration. The book will then be ready for the copy editor, and for me to carry out the necessary selection of photographs. But all this depends upon my writing the chapter on Fairey 1945-56, and that in turn depends upon me – at least to a degree – coming to terms with the loss of our darling boy.

As I’m treading water before diving down into the research and writing of my chapter on the final decade of Sir Richard Fairey’s life, here is an observation and then a series of observations linked through aviation to the project but with no other connections.  Firstly, am I alone in thinking that the opening lines of ‘Jesus Alone’, the first song on Nick Cave’s critically acclaimed new album, Skeleton Tree, is not somehow a premonition of his son’s sad death at Beachy Head, but a direct reference to the Hawker Hunter which crashed on the A27 during the Shoreham Air Show last year (‘He fell out of the sky, into the River Adur…’)?  Secondly, having a polemic on selection published in this week’s New Statesman (a magazine CRF must surely have loathed), I was prompted to write a second piece, on the appalling harassment of east and central European people, especially Poles, since the Brexit result.  Pressure on space during the conference season means the NS can’t publish the article, hence its appearance here:

In my secondary boys school over half a century ago Nowak and Brzezicki cut lonely figures (names have been changed). Nobody seemed very interested in them, and yet their family histories no doubt reflected the appalling upheaval experienced by all Polish families after August 1939. Nowak and Brzezicki – no first names in those days – have been in my mind a lot recently; my memory of them prompted by the news that over thirty attacks upon Polish people have been reported since the Brexit vote, including the murderous incident in Harlow. Added to this are numerous unreported attacks, and the low-level abuse experienced by Poles of all ages – xenophobic behaviour, triggered by a referendum campaign in the course of which the unacceptable became acceptable, and the intolerable became tolerable. As my former class mates could remind us, for the second time in seventy years the British display deep ingratitude to those eager to be our closest friends and allies.

Britain and France offered scant military aid to their newest ally in September 1939 as Germany invaded Poland from the west, followed by Russia’s arrival in the east. Under the terms of their newly signed pact the two dictatorships occupied respective halves of Poland until Hitler ordered his forces eastwards in June 1942. Remarkably, eighty thousand service personnel avoided capture, a quarter of whom did so again when France fell in June 1940. They joined Polish air crew already in Britain, and sixteen squadrons would serve with the RAF. The most successful Hurricane squadron in the Battle of Britain was Polish. Polish squadrons would fly over Normandy on D-Day. Around twenty thousand served in the Polish Air Force, with a further three thousand in the Polish Navy. Soldiers of the First Army Corps, formed from those who got out of France, finally returned to mainland Europe in the summer of 1944; and that autumn Polish paratroopers covered British airborne forces’ withdrawal from Arnhem.

Those regular soldiers and their families who survived the onslaught of 1939 were transported to Siberia by the Russians, with the NKVD murdering hundreds of officers in the Katyn forest. When in 1943 the Germans revealed how many had died at Katyn, Stalin feigned ignorance, with Roosevelt and Churchill exercising a discreet silence in the interest of alliance real politick. For the same reason neither prime minister or president gave the exiled Polish government in London serious support when Russia allowed German forces to crush the Warsaw uprising in late summer 1944, extended its border with Poland westwards, and facilitated the imposition of a predominantly pro-Soviet regime.  Stalin’s only concession was to release the remnants of the Polish Army, which under General Wladyslaw Anders constituted a formidable fighting force. While Anders’ seventy-thousand men made their way to Palestine, their families endured a long and demanding journey to India. From there many, fearful of returning home, travelled to Britain after the war – their experience of exile and resettlement, as seen through the eyes of his grandmother, is movingly recreated in Matthew Kelly’s Finding Poland. Under Anders’ command the Polish Second Army Corps fought their way across North Africa and up through Italy, sustaining significant losses and impressing all who saw them in action. Nowhere were those losses greater than at Monte Cassino, the monastery south of Rome where today a huge Polish cemetery marks the sacrifice made in achieving victory.

Today the remarkable record of Anders and the Second Army Corps is properly commemorated in Warsaw; but during the Cold War Poland’s Communist government deliberately ignored their exploits, and those of their comrades based in Britain. Nearly two hundred thousand exiled Poles fought from 1939 to 1945, of whom well over ten percent were killed or missing.   In Europe and the Mediterranean the Poles fought bravely under British command. Yet in June 1946 the Labour Government responded feebly when Soviet pressure prevented Polish veterans from participating in London’s splendid and spectacular Victory Parade: Attlee and Bevin treated shabbily a nation still traumatised by the horrors of war and occupation.

My class’s shunning of Nowak and Brzezicki can be seen as teenagers’ instinctive suspicion of the unfamiliar. We like to think that in contemporary, multi-cultural Britain such behaviour is a thing of the past – school must be a safe environment in which all are welcome. Hopefully that can be the case, but what about parental influence beyond the playground? What of the impressionable young children exposed to toxic views at home, where prejudice constitutes the norm? Harassment of anyone settled in Britain, young or old, must be condemned unequivocally. Yet targeting Polish people seems especially obnoxious.  How cruelly ironic that too often those demonising the descendants of such staunch wartime allies should be the same people who see the Brexit result as once again ‘our finest hour.’

Having finished my [very long] chapter on Fairey and the Second World War in mid-August, and sent it out to members of the Fairey family and specialists in the field for comment, my involvement in the project has been fairly low key, i.e. other commitments have prevailed.  So this constitutes a brief blog, simply to record that this autumn marks the commencement of the final phase: the penultimate chapter (the last being a conclusion), on CRF’s last decade, 1946-56.  Given that I can’t get to the RAF Museum for some heavy duty archival work until late October, before which I shall be in the Lake District, not a lot of research is occurring at present.  I will, however, read Peter Twiss’s published account of Fairey’s experimental delta-wing jet breaking the world-speed record in 1956, not long before the company’s founder passed away – in this respect Fairey died a happy man.  Unlike Hawker, Fairey’s aircraft were generally not known for their good looks, but the record-breaker was a stunningly beautiful aircraft.  Still much to do, but the end is clearly in sight…

Leadbelly found wartime Washington a bourgeois town in his 1938 song of the same name – in DC at the invitation of folklorist Alan Lomax, he and his wife were repeatedly refused hotel accommodation.  How ironic given that well over thirty per cent of the federal capital’s population was African American, and service and support staff were overwhelmingly black.  The Fairey family lived in Washington from the summer of 1940 to the start of 1945, for most of that time CRF serving as Director-General of the British Air Commission.  Leaving aside the difference in the racial and ethnic composition between the respective capitals of the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1940s, the contrast between the American and British home fronts was stark – on those occasions during the war when the now Sir Richard Fairey returned home (crossing the Atlantic courtesy of Pan Am Clipper, Douglas Skyliner, and requisitioned liner) the difference between the quality of life enjoyed by Americans and the austerity experienced by the British was striking.  Having written around 17,000 words of my chapter on Fairey’s wartime years, a few more days will see its completion.  Sitting at home in the conservatory with my leg propped up on cushions and crutches by my side, one day after my knee operation, I’m aware that completion will be delayed for a little while.  Nevertheless, it won’t be that long; and then I shall just have to research and write a lengthy chapter on Fairey’s final decade.  Add a conclusion and a forward/acknowledgements, and the manuscript will be finished.  At that point I shall await Jane Tennant completing her reading of each chapter, and spend time at Pittleworth Manor viewing home movies to spot anything relevant. Last Monday I went further up the Test and visited Bossington at the invitation of Sarah Jane Fairey to examine a fascinating collection of photographs and news cuttings previously held at Yeovilton.  At least one of those photographs I envisage featuring on the cover of The Man Who Built The Swordfish, which will now definitely be published by I.B. Tauris.  Onwards and upwards, albeit limping along the way!

Until I spend a day in the archives at the Fleet Air Arm Museum next week I’m treading water; with the bulk of Fairey’s postwar papers to be found at the RAF Museum this will be my last trip to Yeovilton. Once I have looked at the remaining boxes in the FAAM’s Cobham Hall (a treasure trove of aircraft and helicopters not on display, with many awaiting refurbishment), then I can begin writing about the soon to be Sir Richard Fairey’s tenure in Washington as deputy and then director of the British Air Commission. In an ideal world I would have spent some time in Washington and Abilene, but my failure to secure funding killed that idea; and in any case personal circumstances mean an extended absence from home is not really feasible. Treading water means more than labouring in the garden, and on Sunday afternoon my wife and I visited Chartwell. We had been before, but in winter when the house is closed. In late December the numbers visiting the gardens are predictably small, but on a Sunday in June with the sun shining Chartwell’s gardens were the place to be. We had made the necessary prior booking for a tour of the house, and at the last the vicarious became an actual experience: rooms familiar from TV documentaries and biopics looked much smaller than when seen on screen. At last the blurred image became a real artefact, allowing the opportunity to study fine detail, from the names listed for a cartoon depiction of anthropomorphic cats attending a late gathering of the Other Club (Duff Cooper seemingly a post-1945 recruit) to the gloriously kitsch glass cockerel given to Clemmie by De Gaulle (“Mon general, merci beaucoup – c’est charmant et parfait pour la salle de dejeuner!”). For such a large house the number of rooms open to the public is quite small, with two or three converted to exhibition areas. While relieved that a tour of the building doesn’t become an endurance test (Broadlands is similarly modest, so no fear of visitor fatigue), one is left slightly dissatisfied. Perhaps this is because, as Mary pointed out, we learned almost nothing about life below stairs, or about family life at Chartwell (such information came from the impressively well-informed guides – lots of references to ‘Winston’ à la Thatcher, but thankfully not in the same fake referential tone). Apparently Randolph was forced to sleep in a very small bedroom, which explains a lot! More about the children would have been welcome as most [sanitised] references were re their adult lives. At least there was an acknowledgement that Clementine didn’t actually like the house, and that ‘friends’ purchased the freehold in 1946 to ease the Churchills’ financial burden. The National Trust would presumably argue that it has to address a huge international audience, and so the priority is to tell the – deliberately heroic – story of Sir Winston Churchill, focusing upon his first premiership and in particular his leadership in 1940, the nation’s ‘finest hour’. Most other key moments in his political career, including his lengthy periods of ministerial office up to May 1929, attract only passing reference, e.g. a recognition that Gallipoli was a disaster, on the basis that Churchill himself acknowledged the severe damage of the Dardanelles to his political career. This reminds us that the great man’s peacetime record rightly attracts considerable criticism [yet he was a great man, if only for his determination to face down Halifax and fight on in 1940 – even if the path to that decision was not as simple and straightforward as popular myth dictates].

The exhibition(s) and the house contents, especially the photographs, provide the informed visitor with a counter narrative, running parallel with a NT meta-narrative rooted in popular mythology and national psyche (‘our island story’ – in fact a very southern English story, rooted in Calder’s ‘Middle England’, and symbolised by Chartwell’s magnificent view across the Kent countryside: ‘This Is England – Fight For It!’). The invisibility of Chamberlain, Baldwin, Halifax, MacDonald, et al – the ‘Guilty Men’ of appeasement – is unsurprising, and perhaps the same might be said of those generals and admirals whose framed photographs are noticeable by their absence. Churchill never understood the taciturn and cerebral Archie Wavell (but then neither did Attlee, who sacked him as Viceroy), so presumably the portrait was turned to the wall sometime around 1943. Wavell’s successor in New Delhi was Mountbatten, whose absence is striking – was Dickie and Edwina’s photograph placed in a drawer in August 1947 when both were seen as party to the ultimate betrayal, granting India independence? SEAC’s success 1943-5 was rooted in the unlikely partnership Mountbatten forged with Slim. These days ‘Uncle Bill’ is seen by many as Britain’s greatest fighting general in WW2, but his modest character and Churchill’s relative disinterest in the ‘Forgotten Army’ explain Slim’s absence from the walls of Chartwell. Needless to say, from room to room Montgomery is highly visible, this legacy of ego and relentless self-promotion obscuring the visitor to the fact that as CIGS Alan Brooke was at the PM’s side for much of the war; the 1950s controversy over his published diary’s criticism of Churchill obscured a then deferential public to the fact that if anyone won the war for Britain it was ‘Brookie’. If the Chief of the Imperial General Staff is an ever present in Grand Alliance conference photos, so too is the Foreign Secretary; but I found no reference to Eden anywhere in the house.

However, the most striking absence is surely Lloyd George. The personal and working relationship of David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill is crucial to our understanding of British politics in the first four decades of the twentieth century, and Richard Toye is not alone in exploring their individual and shared impact on the shape of British society right up to the present day. For all his character flaws, Lloyd George was as successful in peacetime as in time of war. Overall, his record in office is markedly superior to Churchill, the latter very much the junior partner in Asquith’s cabinet despite his elevation to Home Secretary and then First Lord of the Admiralty. With handy ammunition such as the postwar honours scandal, the Tories, quietly encouraged by Labour and the Asquithian Liberals, trashed LG’s reputation after 1922. A self-inflicted wound was shaking hands with Hitler in 1935, fuelling wartime suspicion that Britain as a satellite state of Nazi Germany would have seen Lloyd George play the role of Petain. What’s striking about centennial events re the Great War is the absence of references to the Chancellor of the Exchequer>Minister of Munitions>PM. This winter how publicly and prominently will we mark the formation in December 1916 of the second wartime coalition, with Lloyd George replacing Asquith in Number Ten? Undoubtedly Churchill’s premiership 1940-45 has all but obliterated Lloyd George’s primary place in the national consciousness, as Chartwell so clearly demonstrates. It’s time to redress the balance…

Having written so much about naval aviation in the course of writing The Man Who Built the Swordfish: Sir Richard Fairey, 1887-1956 (still a working title, but the title given to the most likely publisher – with a much belated submission date of this time next year), it would be remiss of me not to note what was taking place in Scotland and the North Sea exactly one hundred years ago today.  With Admiralty code-breakers cognizant of the High Seas Fleet leaving port en masse, Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet sailed out of Scapa Flow to rendezvous with Beatty’s Battle Cruiser Fleet, which had already departed its base at Rosyth.  Today it’s hard to imagine the sight off Orkney and at the mouth of the Firth of Forth as the dreadnoughts under smoke-greyed skies steamed out into open water for what all rightly deemed a date with destiny.  The loss of 6 cruisers, 8 destroyers, and over 6000 men on the night of 31 May-1 June 1916, and Jellicoe’s decision not to turn south and pursue Scheer and Hipper, haunted the Royal Navy for the rest of the war and much of the interwar period – for all the RN’s myriad achievements between 1914 and 1918 it took another world war, and the triumphs of Cunningham, Sommerville, Horton, et al, to restore in the public’s mind the Senior Service’s credentials as a battle-fighting force.  While sceptics like Eric Grove still find it hard to see the outcome of Jutland as a strategic success, this is a widely-held view today, encouraged not unsurprisingly by the Royal Navy itself.  Nick Jellicoe, in Channel 4’s documentary on the battle, defended his grandfather’s decision to maintain the integrity of the Grand Fleet as a guarantee that the Germans would remain trapped in port and subject to crippling blockade; on the British side the villain in the piece was David Beatty, ever ready to rewrite history.  This now mainstream view was advanced in Admiral Lord West’s Radio 4 documentary at the start of the month, and is presumably the basis for Dan Snow’s BBC2 film ‘Battle of Jutland: The Navy’s Bloodiest Day’; I’ve yet to see the latter, but I know it was made in close collaboration with the RN and the National Museum of the Royal Navy.  Nick Jellicoe was a speaker on 21 May at the University of Southampton Lifelong Learning study day I organised and ran, ‘Not Just Jutland: the Royal Navy during the First World War, 1914-18′.  In the morning session Mike Farquarson-Roberts, one-time very senior medical officer and the author of a terrific short history of the RN and WW1, and fellow naval historian Duncan Redford, late of the NMRN, each strongly made the case that from a strategic viewpoint the battle was a victory for the Royal Navy and decisive in terms of the Allies’ eventual victory: it ensured the blockade could be maintained and it reinforced the restricted operations of the German surface fleet given that by 1916 all raiders stationed across the globe two years earlier had been destroyed or neutralised.  Thus Germany was starved into defeat, with Redford unashamedly treating the Western Front as a costly and bloody sideshow to an essentially maritime struggle.  Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.  Yes, the blockade was devastatingly effective, but the Central Powers could have fought on for an awful lot longer without the eastern and south-eastern – and even the Italian – fronts; and significantly, by the summer and autumn of 1918 Germany was demonstrably losing the war in the west.  Critically, had there not been resistance in both western and eastern theatres in the first place, most notably the French holding the line on the Marne (and the same for the BEF at Amiens in April 1918), then the Wilhelmine Reich and its allies would have secured control across the whole of the European land mass at little cost, leaving the Central Powers able to exploit continental resources and thus withstand maritime blockade (as was the case for Hitler’s Germany following its 1940 triumph in the west).  I suspect Duncan had his tongue at least partly in his cheek when dismissing the land war, but he was absolutely right to highlight how demonstrably successful the Royal Navy was in every department other than the Trafalgar-style battle the general public had been led to expect would determine the course of the war. The Royal Navy’s embrace of new technology in the decades preceding the First World War, and across the next four years, was remarkable, and nowhere more so than in its projection of naval air power – the RNAS was so far ahead of its military counterpart that it could famously attack Zeppelin sheds before and at Christmas 1914, its partnership with Shorts meaning seaplanes flown at the start of the war were operable at the end in a way in which no RFC ‘stringbag’ could possibly have been.  The RNAS’s capacity for innovation across the course of the conflict was astonishing, witness the combat aircraft and carriers in service at the point when it merged with the Royal Flying Corps to form the RAF on 1 April 1918.  Dick Fairey’s story is inseparable from that of the RNAS, as becomes clear in the third chapter of my book.  He had a lot more in common with Beatty than Jellicoe, not least their shared love of fishing and shooting, but I feel confident CRF would have recognised that here was a man not to be trusted: Duncan Redford described the RN’s impressive record 1914-18 as a team triumph, but, as I suggested in my summing up at the end of the study day, it’s hard to see Beatty as a team player – and ironically, if any admiral bears responsible for the unhappy experience of the Fleet Air Arm in the 1920s and 1930s then it is Jellicoe’s successor as C-in-C Grand Fleet and then First Sea Lord.  A further irony is that it took  Beatty’s flag captain at Jutland, Ernle Chatfield, to re-establish the FAA as a credible force late in his tenure as Chief of the Naval Staff [Chatfield was a highly effective FSL, but is overshadowed by his successors Pound and Cunningham as he was head of the RN in time of peace not war].

Finally the two big chapters on the 1930s – surely Fairey’s decade – are in near final form.  All I need to do is consult: the files on sailing at Bossington, not least so I can see CRF’s correspondence with the New York Yacht Club in 1933 and 1935-7 re switching from the J-Class to firstly 12-metre Class and secondly a new ‘K-Class’; a file at the National Archives re the action with a U-boat off Bermuda in late 1944 which Fairey’s motor yacht, Evadne, was involved in; and any material at Kew which indicates involvement of my man with security services re the Soviet Union in the 1930s.  Now on to a chapter on 1940-45, for which I have already undertaken quite a lot of research, re CRF’s wartime work in Washington with the British Air Commission.  Then a penultimate chapter on the last decade, and a conclusion.  So, around 120K words written and roughly another 40K to go.  At last, in this unexpectedly long saga, the end is in sight.  After which, back to Mountbatten with Slim in Burma, but that’s another story… Finally the two big chapters on the 1930s – surely Fairey’s decade – are in near final form.  All I need to do is consult: the files on sailing at Bossington, not least so I can see CRF’s correspondence with the New York Yacht Club in 1933 and 1935-7 re switching from the J-Class to firstly 12-metre Class and secondly a new ‘K-Class’; a file at the National Archives re the action with a U-boat off Bermuda in late 1944 which Fairey’s motor yacht, Evadne, was involved in; and any material at Kew which indicates involvement of my man with security services re the Soviet Union in the 1930s.  Now on to a chapter on 1940-45, for which I have already undertaken quite a lot of research, re CRF’s wartime work in Washington with the British Air Commission.  Then a penultimate chapter on the last decade, and a conclusion.  So, around 120K words written and roughly another 40K to go.  At last, in this unexpectedly long saga, the end is in sight.  After which, back to Mountbatten with Slim in Burma, but that’s another story…

I still haven’t been to Kew to discover to what extent, if any, Fairey had dealings with the security services regarding Russia. Clearly a day at the National Archives has to be a priority after Easter, if only because I need to check the Admiralty account of HMS Evadne’s involvement in the sinking of a U-boat off Bermuda in 1944, not long before the requisitioned motor cruiser was returned to CRF. I’ve been writing recently about Evadne’s role from 1931 to 1939 as Fairey’s luxury floating hotel, second office, and support vessel for his racing yachts, whether 12 metre (Modesty, Flica, and Eviane) or J Class (Shamrock V). The original intention was to cover sailing in the penultimate chapter, along with field sports and conservation, but CRF raced only from 1927 to the eve of the Second World War, and so the relevant section fits more neatly within chapter 7, on the second half of the 1930s. The latter chapter remains work in progress as I still have to write about my man’s private life from the moment when he married for the second time and again became a father – of John and Jane. Chapter 8 on the Second World War, and chapter 9 on the last ten years of Fairey’s life, will lead me to the conclusion some time next year – so will end the most interrupted project I have ever worked on: is there at last light at the end of the wind tunnel? Mention of John Fairey reminds me that I also have to visit Bossington to consult files held there re sailing. The friendly rivalry between Fairey and Tommy Sopwith, later neighbours in the Test Valley, is a remarkable story, with TOMS able to launch a second challenge for the America’s Cup in 1937, with Endeavour II, because twice CRF failed to convince the New York Yacht Club to race yachts smaller than the J Class preferred by the Americans – I know that in 1935-6 Fairey tried to launch a challenge based on a wholly new yacht – the ‘K Class’ – fifty tons lighter than the huge J Class yachts, but the present owner of Flica claims that in 1933 he tried to secure the NYYC’s agreement to race ‘second rule’ 12 metre yachts at a time when Flica and her crew were arguably the most successful combination either side of the Atlantic. I have been trying to contact America’s Cup historian, Bob Fisher, who lives just outside Lymington, to find out more but so far been unsuccessful – clearly the friendly phone call is required. I had no idea until starting this research that ’12 metre’ refers not to the length of the boat but a complex formula for determining its size, and the algorithm periodically changes – the 1934 season saw the introduction of the ‘third rule’, which had important consequences for Fairey. What those consequences were, the book will reveal.

I’m acutely aware that it’s been some time since my last blog, but I haven’t been inactive and the – much interrupted – book continues to progress. Having written around 120,000 words I now have to cover Fairey’s private life in the 1930s and I shall at last have reached the Second World War. Given that I have undertaken a reasonable amount of research on CRF and his work in wartime Washingon with the British Air Commission, I hope I can crack on with this after Easter, by which time the two lengthy chapters on the 1930s will be complete (I have asked friends to read the section on the fascinating topic of CRF and the Russians, and thankfully the response has been universally complimentary). Whereas I originally planned for publication in 2017 I now anticipate completion in the second half of the year. I shall write a chapter on the 1940s, and then research/write a chapter on Fairey’s final decade and his rich hinterland, notably sailing, before drafting a conclusion. I envisage the text will total somewhere between 160 and 170,000.
Last Friday night in Sheerness I gave a lecture on local boy James McCudden, the content of which is available below. The audience questions and contributions at the end produced more information, and subsequent photographs, regarding Fairey’s experience with Short Brothers at Eastchurch – my thanks especially to Martin Hawkins, not least for his terrific portrait photograph of the suave, swashbuckling, but exceedingly intelligent Charles Samson, de facto founding father with Murray Sueter of the RNAS, and thus of the Fleet Air Arm.

McCudden VC: Sheppey’s own air ace
Sheppey Little Theatre, 19 February 2016
Introduction
This talk is deliberately ruminative, and not simply a succinct no-frills biography of Major James McCudden, son of Sheppey, scion of Swale. Key information will emerge in the talk, and gaps can be filled in the course of questions afterwards, for which I hope to leave plenty of time. This evening there are essentially five stages in a reconnaissance mission that will take us far beyond the enemy front line, withstanding the bitter cold and oxygen deprivation of flying for long periods at high altitude, before, having flown the flag of the Sheppey Little Theatre in the face of the Red Baron, we turn for home and land in time to knock back a stiff brandy and soda – or three – in the saloon bar of The Napier (or should that be The Aviator at Queenborough)?
• James McCudden – Man of Kent and man of the military
• McCudden on the Western Front – from mechanic to major
• ‘A working-class hero is something to be’ – especially when flying in the RFC
• Surviving the air war – understanding tactics and technology
• Conclusion
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that amidst the nation’s centenary commemorations of the First World War, McCudden’s star has risen high in the firmament. Already the subject of a BBC Timewatch documentary, he features prominently in the RAF Museum’s new gallery dedicated to 1914-18. With biographies published as long ago as 1967 and 1987, I can’t believe that someone is not presently writing a thoroughly researched life of McCudden VC. Hopefully it will be of a higher academic standard than most biographies of Great War air aces which, at the risk of sounding arrogant and snobbish, can be dismissed as ‘anorak literature’. One of the reasons I wrote my life of McCuddden’s great contemporary and fellow man of Kent, Edward ‘ Mick’ Mannock, was the poor quality of earlier biographies – although I was interested in why and when they were written, for example, veteran fliers resurrecting Mannock’s achievements as a mid-1930s warning against German rearmament. Too often these books lack depth because they fail to contextualise; in other words, they focus so much upon the minutiae of their subject’s life that they ignore the bigger picture. Hopefully this evening I can strike a balance between biographical narrative and due explanation of why the air war fought so ferociously above the trenches in the second half of the First World War gives us an insight into how Britain mobilised for ‘industrial war’ – many would argue, ‘total war’.
James McCudden – Man of Kent and man of the military
So why should the Sheppey Little Theatre be staging a talk on a man known to his mates and comrades as ‘Jimmy’ McCudden? The simple answer is that, while born in Gillingham, in 1909 at the age of 14 McCudden came to live in Sheerness, which became the family’s adopted home town. The estuaries of the Medway and the Thames – for the Royal Navy, the Nore – housed several military garrisons and were home waters for a major element of the Home Fleet. The McCuddens were an army family with a long tradition of service, and James’s father, William, was a senior non-commissioned officer in the Royal Engineers. All four of his sons joined up, and all flew – the three eldest died in the course of the First World War. It’s worth noting at this point that James’s younger brother, John McCudden, also rose from the ranks to become an officer in the Royal Flying Corps. The younger McCudden was shot down twice early in 1918, the second time – on 18 March – with fatal consequences. The eldest son, William, had been killed in a training accident three years earlier. As we shall see, James died four months after John, in the summer of 1918. Youngest brother Maurice served with the peacetime RAF before dying prematurely of colitis in 1934. The two daughters lived into old age, as did Mrs McCudden, but Warrant Officer McCudden died at Clapham Junction in 1920 as a consequence of a bizarre train accident. Notwithstanding the huge sense of loss felt in so many homes a century ago, it’s no exaggeration to describe the McCuddens of Sheerness as a truly tragic family.
Young James briefly attended the island’s garrison school but soon left to join the GPO as a messenger boy. He was still too young to enlist, and the Army depended on successive generations of service families joining up as this was a time when taking the King’s shilling was seen by many as a last resort. Remember your Kipling:
For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an` Chuck him out, the brute! ”
But it’s ” Saviour of ‘is country ” when the guns begin to shoot;
An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;
An ‘Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool – you bet that Tommy sees!
While waiting to join the Army James honed his boxing and shooting skills, and took a keen interest in what was going on down the far end of the island, at Leysdown and Eastchurch. Sheppey played a vital role in the development of manned flight in Edwardian England, and the three lasting consequences of the experimentation and tuition that took place in the pioneer years of British aviation were:
• the establishment of Short Brothers as the manufacturer of sophisticated seaplanes capable of attacking the enemy from the onset of war;
• the establishment of the Royal Naval Air Service, merged with the RAF in 1918 but the forerunner of the Fleet Air Arm;
• and the establishment of Fairey Aviation as a consequence of Richard Fairey’s technical and managerial experience with Shorts.
This was not some low profile development, witness the large numbers which before the First World War travelled to Sheerness, and then to Eastchurch on the Sheppey Light Railway, to participate in the summer air displays. The McCudden brothers found themselves in the right place at the right time, and James became obsessed with flying. He read magazines like Flight and The Aeroplane, and he took every opportunity to cross the island and absorb all that was going on around the Eastchurch airfield and aero club.
Direct acquaintance with the mechanics at Shorts and the other smaller enterprises at Eastchurch, plus a readiness to absorb and comprehend dense literature re the theory of flight, complemented the hands-on mechanical experience McCudden gained after joining the Royal Engineers in 1910. He spent two years stationed in Gibraltar so he had plenty of spare time to deepen his knowledge of the mechanics of flying. While young Jimmy was away the Royal Flying Corps was established, and when he returned home he quickly transferred to the RFC. As a qualified air mechanic he secured the ideal posting, being sent in May 1913 to the Royal Aircraft Factory, later the Royal Aircraft Establishment – if McCudden wanted to acquaint himself with cutting edge technology then, other than on the shop floor at Shorts, Farnborough was the place to be. Yet almost immediately he found himself transferred to an RFC squadron, and at last he began to fly on a regular basis, as a passenger in monoplanes built by Louis Blériot’s company. Skilled mechanics needed to fly in the aeroplanes they were maintaining, and men like McCudden were seen by pilots as vital to staying alive.
McCudden on the Western Front – from mechanic to major
In August 1914 Air Mechanic First Class McCudden and his squadron left for France, where they flew repeated reconnaissance missions as the British Expeditionary Force held the line at Mons and then began its costly retreat. From the skies above McCudden, flying as an observer and armed only with a rifle, reported on enemy troop movements throughout the great battles in the autumn of 1914. He maintained this role after a previously fluid conflict turned into the fixed trench warfare with which the Western Front is most closely associated.

By the summer of 1915, with a brother and brother-in-law already dead, McCudden was a sergeant with specific responsibility for engine reliability. He knew how to maximise the performance of his flight’s French spotter aircraft, and this ability to fine-tune aero-engines was a huge asset shared during the war by precious few pilots – Mick Mannock being one such technologically savvy airman. Bizarrely, throughout the autumn and winter of 1915-16 McCudden continued to fly as an observer, and then as an aerial gunner. Yet his initial application for pilot training had been turned down on the grounds that he was too valuable an engineer to risk losing. On several occasions he narrowly escaped death and his courage as a machine gunner eventually earned him his first awards for gallantry, the Military Medal and the Croix de Guerre. Recognition by the French secured McCudden’s promotion to flight sergeant, and a subsequent posting home to commence pilot training.

Between February and June 1916 McCudden passed both the basic and advanced flying courses, gained his pilot’s certificate, was formally graded a First Class Flier , and served as an instructor pending his return to France. He had flown vastly more hours than any of his peers. It was while instructing fresh trainees that he first came across the then Edward Mannock – if at this stage the fledgling pilot failed to make a deep impression upon McCudden, it’s clear the younger man seriously impressed Second Lieutenant Mannock. McCudden was by all accounts a brilliant teacher and after only seven months in France he was back in Blighty passing on the fruits of his apprenticeship in the skies above the Western Front. Lucky to have escaped with his life – some believe that in December 1916 he almost fell prey to von Richthoften himself – McCudden scored five victories during his first posting to France. The fifth and final victory earned the freshly commissioned McCudden the Military Cross.

McCudden was in England during the RFC and RNAS’s most costly phase of the air war, the spring of 1917: the notorious ‘Bloody April’. The Germans again enjoyed air superiority, but British air frames – and finally British aero-engines – were about to gain the initiative. An early sign was the small but potent Sopwith Pup, which McCudden gained vast experience flying before and after his return to France. Even while an instructor McCudden was flying the Pup on air defence duties against the large Gotha bombers attacking London.

Crucially, at this time he became acquainted with Britain’s most famous air ace, then and now – Albert Ball. Ball schooled McCudden in the most effective means of attacking an enemy aircraft without being spotted or exposing oneself for too long to counter-attack – unlike Mannock who invariably attacked at short range from above, McCudden often copied Ball and came in close to his target from below.

Back in France flying the Pup, McCudden enjoyed only modest success, but then in August 1917 he was posted to the RFC’s top squadron in France. 56 Squadron had been home to Albert Ball, and still boasted several much admired fighter pilots. It flew the newly acquired scout – or fighter – the SE5, which when re-tooled and re-engined became the mighty SE5a, of which more a little later. Scoring early ‘kills’ and displaying obvious leadership qualities, McCudden was soon made a flight commander. He used his new authority to raise significantly the standard of maintenance, not least with regard to his own machine: riggers, fitters, and armourers were all coaxed and/or berated to ensure engines, airframes, and guns were all consistently reliable. His evident success was primarily because he had done all these jobs himself, and was not averse to getting his hands dirty in order to instruct or make a point. 56 Squadron’s machines enjoyed a unique level of airworthiness, with consequent saving of lives. For McCudden the aeronautical engineer the SE5a was a testbed for ensuring maximum performance when cruising at high altitude – he re-engineered the Hispano-Suiza power unit to a specification far beyond that envisaged by its designer.

Meanwhile the number of victories rose and rose, such that by the time he was posted home in March 1918 a now exhausted McCudden had shot down no less than 57 aircraft, earning himself a bar to his MC, as well as the DSO and bar. As a role model he was exemplar: 56 Squadron had shot down 175 aircraft with the loss of only 14 pilots killed or missing and 7 captured. No other front-line squadron came anywhere near this performance.

McCudden was famous even before he arrived home, and an appointment at Buckingham Palace to receive the Victoria Cross. The RFC had finally reversed its policy of not highlighting individual officers, and in consequence ace of aces Jimmy McCudden was the hero of Fleet Street. To his immense relief McCudden was despatched to a training depot in Scotland, having spent time partying in London with Mannock while the latter impatiently awaited a further front-line posting. Not that McCudden was the sort of chap to get up to very much mischief, and indeed it was at this point in his life that he became engaged.

As his love life flourished, he began work with the editor of The Aeroplane, Charles Grey, on the manuscript of his memoirs. Flying Fury: Five Years in the Royal Flying Corps was published posthumously and with Air Ministry approval as McCudden’s views on the war were in no way contentious and controversial. He was always a very nice and polite young man, with his autobiography suggesting a surprising degree of deference to his elders and supposedly betters.

Over three months of rest and recuperation ended with the now Major McCudden’s posting as c-in-c 60 Squadron. Having said goodbye to his fiancée and sister, on 9 July 1918 McCudden took delivery of his new and as yet unmodified SE5a and set off across the Channel. In heavy mist he stopped at the Auxi-le-Chateau airfield to seek directions. On resuming his flight McCudden’s engine stalled following a sharp manoeuvre, leaving his aircraft to roll out of control and crash into a neighbouring wood. James McCudden died instantly of a fractured skull, and his body lies today in the Vavannes cemetery, in the Pas de Calais.

‘A working-class hero is something to be’ – especially when flying in the RFC
My first acquaintance with the mythology surrounding air aces like Jimmy McCudden and Albert Ball was in 1963 as a small boy in Coventry listening to BBC Schools Radio: the programme was about Mick Mannock, ‘the ace with one eye’ – nearly forty years later I was able to debunk that particular myth. Back in the early 1960s even pre-adolescent history obsessives like me knew precious little about the Great War other than that this was a terrible tragedy which only really came to the forefront of the national consciousness every Armistice Day. The principal source of our knowledge was of course Biggles. Despite the fact that his creator, Captain W.E. Johns, had actually flown with the Royal Flying Corps, Biggles was every bit the chivalric knight of the air which morale-sensitive propagandists on both sides had projected to war-weary civilians from late 1915 through to the end of the war three years later. Squadron Leader James Bigglesworth reinforced a remarkably resilient image of the men who made up the Royal Flying Corps – these were chaps straight out of varsity or public school, who were dashing, brave, honourable…and doomed. Unless of course they were Biggles, Algy, and Ginger, who for the next forty years lived charmed lives. That image was of course memorably revived and parodied by Rick Mayall as Lord Flashheart in Blackadder.
Ironically, Edmund Blackadder’s misunderstanding about only serving three weeks with a front-line squadron was based on fact, in that most virgin pilots were so unprepared for what was going to hit them once they were in action that the average life span really was just a matter of weeks. The survivors – the veterans, albeit in relative terms – were those who realised that tactics and technology were the secret of survival. That a softly softly approach was the only way to keep alive – even if keeping out of trouble while learning on the job risked mess room accusations of cowardice, as was the case when the inexperienced Mick Mannock joined 40 Squadron in the spring of 1917. McCudden was similarly canny as a tyro pilot, but given his service record since August 1914 no-one would question his courage, just his rank. When I became interested in the social composition of the hundreds of Allied pilots who fought the air war of 1917-18 the first thing I realised was that, contrary to popular assumption, the Royal Flying Corps was anything but homogenous. Yes, there were golden-haired sons of the Edwardian landed classes, but from 1916 they were outnumbered by horny-handed sons of the Empire eager to defend the mother country; or if from Britain so-called ‘temporary gentlemen’ whose commissions were awarded as a consequence of successfully securing a transfer out of their original regiments in order to join the RFC – McCudden was unusual in that he rose from the ranks and was already serving in the Royal Flying Corps. Unusual, but not unprecedented – within such a new corps, devoid of regimental tradition and convention, there was greater opportunity for men to rise from the ranks and be commissioned as pilots. Thus, while class prejudice remained all too apparent, McCudden’s and Mannock’s proletarian credentials were by no means unique. Yet acute snobbery still survived – 85 Squadron became notorious after its officers refused to accept the much decorated McCudden as their CO simply because he had risen through the ranks.

Nevertheless, the RFC, and then from 1 April the Royal Air Force, created for itself a distinct, and distinctively modern, image – ironically, much of the RAF’s image as a genuinely new state-of-the-art military force was thanks to the parallel wing which went to war in August 1914, the Royal Naval Air Service. Indisputably, at the start of the First World War – and arguably for the next four years – the RNAS was ahead of its military counterpart in aircraft design and technological development: pre-war Admiralty commissions were still flying in 1918, which would have been inconceivable for any aeroplane ordered by the War Office.

With such a high attrition rate the RFC could scarcely afford to be sniffy, snobbish, and super-selective. It had to train pilots to keep with up with the astonishing output of Britain’s established or temporary aircraft factories: production rose exponentially in every year of the war, so that in 1918 no less than 30,000 aircraft rolled off the ad hoc assembly lines.

By the time Germany’s shattering assault across the Western Front ground to a halt on 29 April 1918, after five weeks of fierce fighting, the RFC and RNAS, by now unified as the Royal Air Force, had lost over 1000 aircraft. With continuous sorties from dusk to dawn, exhausted front-line squadrons had suffered up to 30% casualties daily – the equivalent of a complete change of personnel every four days. The Germans had launched no less than 76 divisions against British and imperial troops, and their continental allies – the failure of the offensive marked a turning point in the war on the ground, and the same was true in the air.

Sir Hugh Trenchard, one of if not the founding father of the Royal Air Force, had maintained a strategy throughout the war of his squadrons taking the battle to the enemy, even at the RFC and the RNAS’s darkest hour in ‘Bloody April’ 1917. The summer and autumn of 1918 saw this aggressive, offensive strategy ruthlessly applied. In 1914 pilots, and observers like Corporal McCudden, did little more than carry out reconnaissance; but by 1918 that role was being carried out in a far more sophisticated fashion. In addition, aircraft were involved in strategic bombing and strafing ground forces on the grand scale. Crucially, in the air, the Allied air forces were fighting the final rounds of an epic struggle with the jastas of the German Air Service.

Surviving the air war – understanding tactics and technology
The armistice of 11 November 1918 marked the end of an air war waged ruthlessly above the trenches throughout the preceding two years. Early dogfights had changed beyond all recognition. Now aerial confrontations between Allied and German fighter aircraft were far less crude, and fought on a much greater scale than in the early part of the war. Why? Because the air war demanded a revolution in tactics; and crucially, a revolution in technology. The Germans could boast tactical geniuses like Immelman, then Boelcke, and finally von Richthofen.

For the British a key figure in the emergence of this new form of air fighting was Albert Ball, flying as we have seen with the elite 56 Squadron. Prior to his death on 7 May 1917 Ball shot down 43 aircraft and one balloon. He bridged the transition in tactics and technology from the early dogfights, where scout pilots frantically sought to gain the best position from which to fire their wing-mounted machine guns, to the formation flying of 1917-18, where their successors endeavoured to gain the edge in speed, manoeuvrability, and weaponry.
Ball’s service just overlapped with Mick Mannock, who transferred into the RFC largely because he was so inspired by Britain’s first publicly acclaimed air ace. As if passing the baton, Mannock’s first success, downing a balloon, took place the day Albert Ball died. Mannock had already discovered another inspiring figure – James McCudden, himself much influenced by Ball. Unlike Albert Ball, McCudden was someone Mannock could readily identify with – although he was younger and with a service not a civilian background, McCudden shared Mannock’s Irish working-class roots, his Kentish origins, and his relaxed approach to Catholicism.

For all his emotional intensity re waging war in the air, McCudden’s personality and approach to fighting the air war contrasted with the singleminded – and increasingly psychologically disturbed – Mannock. An emotionally ravaged Mannock would realise his worst nightmare, defying his own edict never to fly low and crashing in flames on 26 July 1918 – he still hadn’t come to terms with McCudden’s death earlier in the month.

Neither did McCudden have much in common with the top Canadian air ace William ‘Billy’ Bishop, always a loner. The single-minded ‘Bishop was no team member, let alone team leader. McCudden, ever the tactician, was a more suitable squadron commander, assuming he could circumvent or suppress any surviving class prejudice.

Yet it was Bishop’s successor as commander of 80 Squadron, Mick Mannock, who by mid-1918 could lay claim to be the Allied fliers’ master strategist; in the first half of 1918 his ideas and influence became a powerful influence on the newly established RAF’s front-line squadrons. As an active member of the Wellingborough branch of the Independent Labour Party – the ILP – Mannock insisted that socialism offered a model for waging aerial warfare. Trust, collaboration, innovation, mutual responsibility, and above all, team spirit, when combined together were key elements in the new tactics hammered out 20,000 feet above the trenches.

Like Albert Ball and James McCudden, Edward Mannock enthusiastically embraced technological innovation, pushing his scout – his fighter aircraft – the SE5a and its potent weaponry to the limits. The eighteen months following the RFC’s reverses of ‘Bloody April’ 1917 saw the emergence of new ideas and new leaders. Unusually, Mannock was a technocrat and an ideologue, the latter fuelling interwar speculation as to what role he would have assumed within the Labour Party had he survived. McCudden, in contrast, was of a more conservative hue, assuming upward social mobility could be enjoyed by anyone with the right skills – including of course social skills – and a bit of luck.

By comparison with the aircraft that the RFC and even the RNAS flew in 1914, the aircraft flying four years later constituted remarkably sophisticated machines – whether they be bombers (in 1919 a Vickers Vimy would cross the Atlantic), or fighters. In terms of armaments, the key technological development for both sides was the Constantinesco synchronising gear, which allowed cowling-mounted machine guns to fire through the propeller. Each side’s success was rooted in temporary technological superiority, so that the pendulum swung from one side to the other depending upon the quality of front-line aircraft. The Allies’ huge losses in ‘Bloody April’ 1917 were because their Nieuport 17 scouts were outgunned and outmanoeuvred by the Albatros D3. The same would occur in early 1918 with the last great Focker, the DVIII. But the Allies eventually gained a clear advantage in quantity and in quality, with the Sopwith Camel and the SE5a. The Camel is the Spitfire of the First World War in capturing the popular imagination (thank you, Biggles), but the much uglier SE5a was a solid gun platform, like the Hurricane. If, like Mick Mannock, or to a lesser extent Jimmy McCudden, your flight cruised for long periods at 20,000 feet, waiting to dive out of the sun and unleash a stream of machine gun bullets at less than 100 yards from your target, then you flew the SE5a. This was truly a killing machine.

Conclusion
Both Major McCudden and Major Mannock were Catholic working-class boys of Irish descent whose ruthlessness, professionalism, cunning, tactical innovation, and technical expertise had made them natural leaders in a wholly new kind of war. The likes of McCudden and Mannock knew that if you were going to survive then you had to understand how the machinery worked, through knowledge both of the aircraft itself and, crucially, of its armaments – they always sighted and loaded their machine guns, not entrusting the task to ground crew. Trained mechanics, they felt comfortable with the technology. A classical education was of limited value sighting your guns or re-checking your ailerons, as many well-educated young men found out to their cost – not all of them by any means; and the older they were then the more cautious and the more ready to learn they proved. McCudden and Mannock offer a fascinating insight into the nature of the first ‘total’ or ‘industrial’ war. Their respective achievements highlighted the need to embrace and understand the new technology in order to survive; and that technical expertise was now a key criterion for advancement within a mechanised fighting force. They represented the new face of the 20th century where being of a working-class background would no longer automatically mean anonymity and social immobility. Yet, such a confident concluding statement demands a caveat.

For every James McCudden who escaped his proletarian roots by securing a commission and with it the promise – had he lived – of a very different postwar life from that of his father or even his brothers, there were hundreds of thousands of young working-class men fulfilling the same acquiescent role in the trenches as on the factory floor. Nor did circumstances change that much in the Second World War, with my father unusual in starting the war on the assembly line at Armstrong Whitworth and ending it as a staff officer in Berlin. ‘Temporary gentlemen’ were invariably middle class grammar school boys, often with Territorial Army credentials – the same had been true in the First World War, witness Bill Slim’s rise via unfashionable regiments from the suburbs of Edwardian Birmingham to Chief of the Imperial General Staff (‘Bobs’ – Field Marshal Lord Roberts – had followed a similar path in late Victorian Britain, and he really was the exception to the rule). The RAF was always seen as the least hidebound and most open-minded of the three services when it came to class. Popular mythology surrounding Fighter Command in the summer of 1940 and Bomber Command attacking the Reich still implicitly assumes the pilots are officers, when the reality was that a large number were flight sergeants drawn from the less affluent end of the social spectrum. It took the 1960s, with ‘Braddock VC’ flying his Lancaster in the Victor comic and Ian McShane as a Spitfire-flying non-commissioned officer in the epic Battle of Britain, for consumers of popular culture to appreciate that precious few RAF pilots from the heart of the Empire had looked and spoken like David Niven or Richard Todd.

Richard Vinen’s wonderful study of National Service from the late 1940s to the early 1960s makes clear how, unless they had really stood out at grammar school, bright young men from humbler backgrounds joining the RAF were seen as ideal NCOs, not officer material. Even if selected as officers they had no chance of becoming a pilot as only a handful of conscripts – all ex-public school – were trained to fly. Would today’s RAF recognise a Jimmy or a John McCudden, and would the system enable him to rise to a senior command? The answer has to be yes, but today of course promotion does not take place while the candidate is on active service – for obvious reasons there are no front-line emergency commissions. The biggest challenge in peacetime is surely when experienced NCOs commence their officer training. McCudden, for all his trials and tribulations in a deeply stratified society, was very good at assimilation – and this surely is the greatest test when service personnel commence the process of transferring from the sergeants’ to the officers’ mess, which even in the RAF involves a huge cultural shift. If Warrant Officer James McCudden was seeking promotion today one can imagine him arriving at Cranwell, keeping his mouth shut, playing by the rules, unfussily demonstrating his astonishing range of technical skills, and quietly making his mark. Why – because of natural ability, but also because in 2016 the system allows for raw talent to be identified and fostered. There was scant respect for meritocracy among the most powerful stratas of society in Edwardian Britain – not least the military – and yet the test of twentieth-century war provided rare opportunities to seize the moment and buck the system.

James McCudden recognised this new reality, making the most of the extraordinary range of skills he acquired while still a humble mechanic and eagle-eyed observer and gunner. Thanks to the prewar pioneers at Leysdown and Eastchurch, Sheppey really does have a strong claim to be the birthplace of British aviation. Despite Shorts’ continued presence, the onset of the First World War saw the focus shift away from the island to the Medway towns. Yet wartime Sheppey retained a close association with British aviation, not least via the important RNAS station at Eastchurch. Highlighting Jimmy McCudden’s formative years in Sheerness is a means by which we can restate Sheppey’s credentials as the cradle of British aviation both before and during the First World War. When commemorating the centenary of this terrible conflict we recognise the remarkable achievement of McCudden VC, and equally the contribution made by the residents of this island, whether in uniform or on the home front.

Stakhanovite mining of the archival mother lode in June and July means I have worked my way through boxes sent to the Hartley Library from the Fleet Air Arm which contain material pertinent to Fairey in the 1930s (needless to say, the papers contained much that was relevant to before and after the decade in question, prompting minor reworking of previously written chapters or supplementing files already started re CRF’s later life).  Notwithstanding Fairey’s role in wartime Washington with the British Air Commission, the 1930s is the decade in terms of our man at the peak of his powers, and the peak of his power [it sounds better than it reads!].  Ironically, it’s also the decade when the hinterland begins to dominate, at the expense of  Fairey’s main mission in life, namely to build more combat (and ultimately civil) aircraft than any other manufacturer in Britain.  There are too many things going on in his life, from managing the Bossington estate at the end of the decade to fast-tracking his freshly adopted persona as a master helmsman and pillar of the sailing establishment.  Thus, more and more he conducts business from his motor yacht Evadne (requisitioned by the Royal Navy in September 1939), with much of his time devoted to 12-metre racing (and even J-class after he bought Shamrock V, with one eye on contesting the America’s Cup after Sopwith), weekend shoots, and uninterrupted afternoons fly fishing.  I wonder if this is one reason why, despite in 1932 CRF’s chief salesman urged him to seize the opportunity and exploit a fund of goodwill towards Fairey Aviation in Moscow, he never went back; the result I suspect is that, instead of adding to the solitary Firefly exported to Russia, Ilyushin and his design team simply adopted [stole?] the technology for a home-grown version.  Note that Dick Fairey had been to Russia, some time in 1931 as yet to be identified.  The FAAM papers provided the memoir of a Hayes mechanic who went to Moscow in 1931 to assemble and rig a Type IIIF, and an extremely detailed diary of van de Velde who lead the Firefly sales/engineering team in the autumn of 1932, but they yielded up nothing re the Big Man’s visit in between – presumably taking advantage of the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement signed by MacDonald’s second Labour Government and later reneged on after ‘Ramsay Mac’ formed the first National Government.  The RAF Museum’s company papers have so far revealed nothing about Russia, including visits made by Soviet aviators to Hayes.  I shall spend some time at Kew seeing if such a staunch anti-Bolshevik, albeit one who firmly believed that business is business, was reporting back to MI6 as well as the Air Ministry’s intelligence operation.  What I don’t intend to do is pursue this line of inquiry, where a combination of excessive bureaucracy and a Putin-inspired accelerated shut-down of Soviet archives would see a great deal of time, effort, and expenditure generate miserable results.

Two tangential thoughts generated by immersing myself in these papers from eight decades ago: firstly, the purchase of services and of goods is – excluding Fairey’s penchant for fast coupes fresh from Detroit – exclusively British, with domestic manufacturers and retailers proving for every need, both industrial and personal; secondly, in correspondence there is an abundance of excessive deference, but this is counterbalanced by an effortless demonstration of courtesy and respect.  As someone who can remember the 1950s, when as a little boy I was acutely conscious of petit bourgeois social mores, and who is in many respects a product of the following decade, when deference was signally part of redundant ‘old world values’, I do not want a society where we return to bowing and scraping.  However, I do feel that courtesy and respect are values rapidly disappearing over the horizon of our fiercely atomised society.  What prompts this observation is listening to Today this morning on Radio 4 and noting that the PM is now almost universally referred to as ‘Cameron’.  I am not suggesting that we adopt a US-style convention of respect for the office if not the holder (a convention Republicans have increasingly ignored since Obama entered the White House), but nevertheless whoever is in No 10 deserves a measure of formal recognition.  I am not an admirer of the present Prime Minister but I was genuinely shocked by the way he was addressed and spoken to on the pre-election Question Time last spring; the fact that Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband were treated worse is no excuse – none of them should have faced an audience which, however sceptical they were about each party leader’s policies, was unacceptably rude: did those audience members who accused the PM and the Leader of HM Opposition of lying appreciate the gravity of the charge and the offensive nature of their remarks?  Shame on them, and on everyone else who in their day-to-day behaviour demonstrates total indifference to basic social conventions of respect and courtesy.  If this is how we behave as ostensibly mature adults, then how can we in any way act as responsible role models for our children and grandchildren?